Part 1: Traffic. The Metric Nobody Wants to Own.
By Chad Pickard
Not all sunshine and rainbows.
That was the message. A screenshot. YTD numbers stacked against last year. Some up. Mostly down. A friend in a different industry sending me a gut check in the middle of a Tuesday.
I asked one question. What's your traffic like?
The pause before the answer told me everything. “Seems down.”
That pause lives in a lot of shops right now. And here's the thing. Most owners can't actually answer that question. They think they can because they have transaction data. They have sales numbers. They have a feel for the floor. None of that is traffic.
In my last piece I said it plainly: transaction count is not a traffic number. It's an output. [LINK] Traffic is something else entirely. If you can't measure it, you can't manage it. So let's talk about measuring it.
If you sell online you already know this number. Your platform hands it to you every morning. Sessions. Unique visitors. Pages per visit. Online retailers obsess over web traffic because it tells them whether anyone is showing up before they ever look at a sales number. Brick and mortar owners have the exact same metric available. Most of them are flying blind.
A door counter is about as unsexy as it gets. It's not AI. It's not a CRM integration. It's a sensor on a door frame that counts how many times the door opens. That's it. And yet I find more resistance to this number than almost any other metric in a retail operation.
The objections are predictable. We have two doors. Our employees use that entrance. UPS comes through there with bikes. What about the customer who brings in all four kids and the dog?
Here's the answer to all of those: yes. Count them.
The UPS driver showing up more often means you're selling more bikes. More employees on the floor means your sales volume supports the payroll. The family of four plus a dog is exactly the kind of visit you want more of. None of that is noise. All of it is signal. You're not watching this number like a stock ticker. You're looking at it weekly. Maybe monthly. You're looking for trends. Direction, not precision. Over time the inconsistencies even out. What you're left with is an honest picture of whether people are choosing to walk through your door.
I lived two blocks from my store. Great for grabbing a tube. Less great when staff knew I was one call away.
I'd get the five alarm fire text and race over. If Strava existed back then I'd have owned that segment. Every KOM. Local legend.
I'd walk in and find four employees, three customers, everything under control.
"I thought you were busy?"
It just felt that way.
Feeling busy and being busy are not the same number. A door counter doesn't care how the floor feels. It just counts.
The door counter measures one thing: whether people are choosing to come back. That's on the owner. That's on the staff. Not as a blame thing. As a systems thing. You built the experience. Your team delivers it. The counter keeps score. Number trends up, something is working. Number trends down, something isn't. The counter won't tell you which. That's next.
If you want to start tracking traffic and contribute to something bigger at the same time, fill out the retailer form at the link below. PeopleForBikes will reach out to you. Email Peter at peter@peopleforbikes.org and request a door counter. Retailers who submit POS data to the PeopleForBikes Data Suite get full platform access for free. The door counter is how you start gathering the number that makes all of it useful.
https://datasuite.peopleforbikes.org/#access
Piece 2 is where the number gets useful. Traffic paired with transactions tells you something your P&L never will. That's next.
In the meantime, if you already know your traffic is down and you're ready to talk about what's driving it, schedule a call. We'll figure it out. [Schedule Today]
Part 2
Part 3